This is a lush, heartbreaking, magnificent feast of a book, a book that asks and answers, again and again, what it means to be alive. Lament and prayer and bawdy love song, vibrating wound and celebration, this book will teach you, haunt you and hold you tight.

It is Sheryl St. Germain's voice that will finally get you. Hers is a voice of a master singer, one trained in the ancient ways of telling a story and one fiercely contemporary. It speaks a wild, native tongue, translatable only by the turns we are willing to make to enter deeply into our own experiences as travelers in an almost unbelievable story. If you have ever been lost and away from home, if you have ever gone to war, if you have ever come home to a world you no longer fit into, or addicted to the beauties and dangers of the world; if you have ever refused to be displaced, if you are the prodigal son or daughter in your family's story, Navigating Disaster will tell part of your story. In these "sixteen essays of love and a poem of despair" Sheryl St. Germain is confident enough in her own voice to give a nod to her old mentor Pablo Neruda, but the essays and the world she reports on are product of a vast intelligence and a equally vast imag-ination that is all hers. Here is a world where poetry is brought to every line of the essay and the urgency and the mind of essai propels the singular poem in the collection, a world where boundaries are elusive, nowhere moreso than the place where the world of nature and the world of humans meet.

Navigating Disaster sings of every kind of saint that ever had a story and it turns away from no sinners, not a one.

--Darrell Bourque, former Poet Laureate of Louisiana

Like many forces of nature, Navigating Disaster starts with a low hum and builds to a crescendo that tectonically shifts your world. Its honesty illuminates darkness, begs for light, and confirms that we desperately need a writer like Sheryl St. Germain to paint for us the beautiful and necessary chiaroscuro we live daily. Too many books are called brave. This book is downright seductive. It will embrace you, make you feel new things, and leave you a little bit changed by the time it ends.